> Winter light from a wall-size east window fills her pleasant studio in Georgetown, where Dahlov Ipcar stands before two panels of a 4-by-10 mural in progress.
> Maine forest animals depicted in the mural have the unmistakable look of every graceful Ipcar creature: Realistic, yet human enough to have a soul.
> The mural is a commissioned work for the Midcoast Health Center in Brunswick.When it's installed in the new hospital next November, it will be the ninth Ipcar mural in this state and others. Add to that the 30-plus books she's illustrated, her fabric sculpture, published short stories and myriad individual paintings.
> At 83, Ipcar is about as well known in this state as Maine artist JamieWyeth. And like Wyeth, she comes from a family of notable artists with a long Maine association.
> Her father, William Zorach, a painter and sculptor born in 1887 in Lithuania, was a versatile American modernist who worked in stone and bronze and painted in water color. Ipcar's mother, Marguerite Zorach, is known for her tapestries, block prints and oil paintings.
> This year, Mainers devoted to the work of Ipcar and the Zorachs have a double treat. Or call it a triple treat.
> Besides the unveiling of Ipcar's most recent mural at the Midcoast Health Center, the Portland Museum of Art has scheduled a major retrospective of Ipcar and the Zorachs' works. It begins Oct. 6 at the Portland Museum when approximately 70 Ipcar paintings and sculpture go on display. Tracing the artist's development from the 1930s to 2000, they will fill the museum's second floor gallery and entry hall.
> Then, beginning Nov. 8, the largest ever Maine exhibit of William and Marguerite Zorach's work gets under way in the first floor gallery of the museum.
> According to Jessica Nicoll, curator of the two exhibits, more than 90 works by both the Zorachs are part of this exhibit. Included are paintings and large bronze works by William Zorach, plus fabric art and paintings by Marguerite Zorach, among them "The Woolwich Marshes" and "Diana Of The Sea."
> The Zorach show will conclude Jan. 6. The Ipcar show will continue until Jan. 27.
> While work by Ipcar and the Zorachs has been shown at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and at Bates College in Lewiston among many other places, the upcoming exhibit has a larger scope.
> "It is, I think, the most comprehensive show of Dahlov and the Zorachs over the full span of their careers," said Nicoll. "Certainly this is the first retrospective Dahlov has been given, and the first time viewers will have a chance to see her later work."
> As preparations for the restrospective go on at high speed, Dahlov Ipcar and her husband, Adolph, continue their quietly productive life in the white 19th century farmhouse where they have lived since 1936.
> At 96, Adolph Ipcar enjoys good health. A former teacher and farmer, he still photographs his wife's work for exhibitions, carrying the sometimes ponderous paintings out-of-doors, and propping them against a make-shift background of roofing paper.
> "It can be tricky," he says, "what with the sun going in and out of the clouds."
> The story of Adolph and Dahlov Ipcar's life in Maine, and Dahlov Ipcar's earlier childhood, is an intriguing look at the development of an artist.
> Born in 1917 in Vermont, Dahlov Ipcar spent most of her childhood with her artist parents and their bohemian friends in New York City.
> Though deeply interested in drawing and painting while still a child, her parents never gave her art classes, or sent her to art school.
> "My parents had gone to Paris in the early 1900s where they had academic training, and they had to un-learn it all," said Ipcar. "So they thought they would see what would happen if they left me alone." Looking back, she thinks it was a fine idea.
> "Dahlov," said her husband wryly, "was her parents' great experiment - and it worked."
> In 1923, William and Marguerite Zorach bought as a summer place what's now called "The Zorach Farm" in the Robinhood Village section of Georgetown. A few years later they bought an adjacent farmhouse where the farm's caretaker once lived.
> Today, the two houses remain in the family. Adolph and Dahlov Ipcar live in the caretaker farmhouse. The original Zorach farm, which includes a childhood wall mural drawn by Dahlov Ipcar, is the residence of her brother's widow, Margaret Zorach.
> In 1931, when Dahlov was 14 and summering in Maine, William Zorach hired Adolph Ipcar to help with haying. Twenty-six at the time, he was a native of New York City who taught high school and worked as an accountant.
> Adolph Ipcar returned each summer to hay the Zorach fields. Four years later, he and Dahlov married in New York City. It was the start of their more than 20-year experiment in subsistence living and art. Moving to what had been the caretaker's cottage, the Ipcars grew all their food. They also tended a barnyard of creatures that would show up over the years in Dahlov Ipcar's prolific art. Chickens, pigs and horses roamed their farm. With milk from six Jersey cows, Adolph Ipcar began a milk route serving 40 to 50 customers in Georgetown. Along with milk, he also sold eggs and butter.
> When their sons were born in 1939 and 1942, Dahlov Ipcar pushed her art time back to early morning, working silently in her often-cold house that didn't get electricity until after World War II.
> "Too many people let themselves get distracted by having children or jobs," she said. "But if you get up at 5 in the morning you can get an awful lot done. I never let myself get sidetracked."
> Charles Ipcar, 58, Richmond, remembers his parents walking around the house with kerosene lanterns. He accompanied his father on his milk route and hung around William Zorach in summer, while the elder man worked on sculptures.
> "I assumed at the time that, like me, everyone grew up on a farm," said Charles Ipcar. "It was only when I got to school that I found out that other kids' parents went lobstering or worked at Bath Iron Works."
> William Zorach could be fun or irascible depending upon his mood, recalls Charles Ipcar. His father, he remembers, was sometimes "stressed out" by the farm.
> But he also recalls playing for hours while his mother worked at her paintings in the living room, her workplace of choice before construction of the studio in the 1960s.
> "She was always patient," he said. "Always a supporting parent."
> Though she began painting in the1930s style of social realism, influenced at the time by muralists like Diego Rivera, Dahlov Ipcar developed her own unique style.
> Some art critics see in her work the influence of Peter Bruegel, the 16th century Flemish painter known for his depiction of peasants and animals.
> Dahlov Ipcar at first painted farm animals. Later, she switched to exotic animals of Africa and India. She's never been to either the continent or the country; she always paints from imagination.
> "I think I get a three-dimensional quality from my father and a decorative sense from my mother," said Ipcar. "But I don't think I ever tried to paint like either of them."
> She also acknowledges the influence of Cubism, an influence seen in the Maine woodland animal mural she's completing for the Midcoast Health Center.
> Behind the foxes and other animals in this golden orange mural, intersecting geometric lines separate the animal forms.
> "It does something to my art I find hard to explain," she said. "I don't think it needs an explanation."
> While some critics contend that Ipcar would be better known if she courted the New York art scene the way her parents did, others don't see it that way. Her work, they say, reaches the public in spite of her somewhat reclusive Maine life.
> Most adults who grew up in a reading household owned at least one magical Ipcar book. Her paintings are in many private collections, and in museums that range from the Metropolitan in New York to the Farnsworth in Rockland.
> Tom Crotty, owner of the Frost Gully Gallery in Freeport, Ipcar's long-time gallery, calls her work refreshing and delightfully different.
> "Where does she fit in? " he asked. "She doesn't. She is very unique; the product of a unique upbringing."
> These days, the one-time numerous farm animals and dogs no longer roam the Robinhood Farm of Adolph and Dahlov Ipcar. The autumnal mural in Ipcar's studio may be her last.
> "Mentally, I could do a dozen of them, but physically I can only work about an hour a day," she said. "But it's funny. I get as much done in an hour as I used to get done in half a day."
> Except for photographing his wife's work, Adolph Ipcar is free of farm projects, too, and happy to be done with such work.
> "What I like to do now," he said, "is watch Dahlov."
Maine Sunday Telegram: March 18, 2001
Staff Writer Lloyd Ferriss can be contacted at 791-6457 or at: lferriss@pressherald.com
Note: Her studio and home are in Georgetown, not Phippsburg as that first paragraph says. lf.